Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Zechariah 14:15: And so shall be the plague of the horse, of the mule, of the camel, and of the ass, and of all the beasts that shall be in these tents, as this plague.

Grasshoppers, hail, rain, lightning all possible during Obama speech

By Alan Gathright - Rocky Mountain News

Planners of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination at Invesco Field may want to keep a weather-eye out for history of a different kind.

Think: grasshopper swarms blotting out the sun and lightening strikes, marble-size hail and 53 mph winds.

All these have occurred in the Denver area on Aug. 28 through recorded history, according to National Weather Service.

A Focus on the Family video drew international headlines with a video humorously urging people to pray for a “biblical” deluge on Obama’s big night under open skies with 75,000 people.

“One of the guys here joked that ‘Focus on the Family is praying for the wrong stuff. They could be praying for the grasshoppers, they might get that instead of the rain,’ ” recounted Carl Burroughs of the National Weather Service in Boulder.

That’s because records show Aug. 28, 1875 was smack in the midst of a 12-day swarm of grasshoppers that “almost darkened the sun,” blanketed streets, “devastated” Denverites’ gardens and devoured ripening grain crops in the countryside.

An AccuWeather.com forecast for Obama’s address calls for rain and a temperature of 39 degrees, though — as any Coloradan will tell you — Rocky Mountain weather can change in a minute — let alone 13 days.

Still, that 15-day forecast calls for a hot day on Aug. 28, with a high of 91, followed by a cool, rainy night.

History says that’s not out of the ballpark of possibilities.

The record high for Aug. 28 was 94 degrees in 1969. The record minimum temperature was 42 degrees in 2004.

A record .68 inch of rain fell on that day in 1882.

The severity of summer thunderstorms tends to weaken as the days cool toward the end of August.

But on that day in 1970, a 53 mph wind gust was recorded at Stapleton International Airport.

On Aug. 28, 1968, lightening strikes seriously injured a man riding a roller coaster at a Denver amusement park and an airline worker at Stapleton while triggering several house fires in the city.

On that day in 2002, three-quarter inch hail rattled Parker.

On the bright side, snow had never been recorded in Denver in August.

But, there was 1.3 inches of hail on Aug. 31, 1951.

(nods to my ‘retired’ Marine buddy Chuck)

Not to worry, however.The Messiah has been performing miracles since he was but a young prophet of Hope and Change when he lived in the Village Of Che … er, Chi in the company of his first disciples.

A glimpse of the young Obama in action

By John Blake - (CNN)

In 1987, I got a sneak preview of one of the most unlikely political stories of our time. It would take me nearly 20 years to figure out that I had stumbled upon a slice of American history.

I was a summer intern in Illinois at the Chicago Tribune newspaper. An editor dispatched me to City Hall to cover a demonstration. When I arrived, I found a group of angry African-American women shouting at a group of white city officials in a crowded waiting room.

I tried to talk to some of the women, but it was difficult to pry any of them away from the demonstration because they were so angry. Some of the women grew so agitated that they started to shove the flustered city officials and yell in their faces.

Now there was nothing unusual about this scene. Chicago has long been a tough political town and that certainly was the case when I arrived there in the mid-1980s. Chicagoans had elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor four years earlier, but racial tensions were still simmering.

The city had recently been dubbed “Beirut on the Lake” because of the constant clashes between Washington and the city’s white political establishment. I still remember how stunned I was when I watched a race riot erupt on television the previous summer when black demonstrators tried to enter a public park in a white, working-class neighborhood. People even warned me not to venture into certain white neighborhoods after dark.

So, the ugly demonstration at City Hall didn’t surprise me. This was Chicago. But then something unusual took place.

As the City Hall demonstration threatened to veer out of control, a lanky man suddenly walked up to the women protesters. He appeared to be in his mid-20s, and he wore a short afro and overalls.

The women’s shouts trailed off when they saw him. The young man had an annoyed look on his face and, motioning with his index finger, he summoned the women to a corner in the room. They formed a circle around him, some still mumbling in anger.

“What did we come here for?” he asked them.

They gave an answer in unison.

He asked another question and they gave another collective answer.

As the man posed his questions, the anger of the women subsided. It seemed like this was an exercise that they had all rehearsed beforehand to keep the women’s anger in check.

The women then took a collective breath, pivoted and resumed their demonstration, with the young man leading the way this time. The entire episode didn’t last more than five minutes.

That moment, for whatever reason, never left me. It’s not as if the man said anything clever or inspiring. I actually don’t remember anything he said after his first question.

How, I wondered, could these tough, angry women listen with such deference to someone who was so much younger and seemed so different?

Despite his humble appearance, he didn’t look like he came from the same world as they did. I could tell by his diction that he was well educated. And I didn’t see any evidence of hard living in his smooth, honey-colored face. He looked like a kid standing next to these angry women with their hardened faces.

Yet these women hung on his words like quiet schoolchildren listening to their teacher.

I left the demonstration with no story but with this thought. I felt sorry for the guy. His protest was doomed to fail and no one would probably hear of him. Poor people don’t evoke too much sympathy. I thought he could do a lot more with his life if he did something else.

Fast-forward to 2004. That’s when I started to hear about a young politician coming out of Chicago. Then I heard about a famous speech the same politician gave that year, but I missed the speech on television. Three years later, I heard that the same guy was running for president and someone says he’s a former community organizer from Chicago.

Chicago? Community organizer? No. Could it be? I looked up the politician’s name on Google and I did a little math. Then I called up his picture on the Internet and I recognized his face.

I didn’t know his name when I saw him leading that demonstration 20 years ago, but now I knew.

His name was Barack Obama.